Category: Finance

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Finance

Day 389 and Bear Down for Midterms

I used to be something of a perma-bear. I was always somewhat convinced that bad shit was just around the corner. I guess you can see that in my persistent interest in doomer culture. But as the world continues to experience “the crumbles” I’ve softened my general stance on everything is awful.

Crypto is arguably responsible for much of my stance. For all the bitching about Web3’s lack of decentralization and heady “takes” on how this has all been done before, I actaully do this think is the next wave. Do I think we are due for a lot of crashing and failures and unrealized promise? Also yes.

So when the market decided to do a January bubble bursting I was surprised at how sanguine I was. I kind of didn’t believe it was going to turn into a full blown recession rout. Now this is not to say I don’t think stuff is frothy, as I clearly do. But I think the weirding has so confused markets that who knows when contagion bubble popping is going to hit for real. I don’t think we are there yet.

And indeed I started this post in the morning and by market close stuff kinda bounced. Maybe a dead cat bounce. But who even knows is my point. I don’t think we will see a genuine correction till a real market leader like Facebook or Microsoft pulls a Worldcom or an Enron. I wouldn’t be shocked if it was Tesla but I ain’t playing that short. I think it’s more likely that “Meta” fucks itself in the transition to the metaverse or whatever and then we get a real systemic crash. Right now no one gives a single fuck if all of crypto goes to zero. We need much bigger game to drive a recession. Systemic Lehman brother shit.

Which is long way of me making an elaborate Community joke. That TV show with the Talk Soup guy. They had a plot where someone misspoke or made a bad joke and the theme at their community college dance was “Bear Down for Midterms” and no it isn’t a real phrase. My basic feeling on a recession is that the Fed will toss us a couple rate hikes to deal with inflation. But half of America is convinced the pandemic isn’t over. Congress could be talked into more stimulus since the midterms are bearing down on us and well the Democrats are going to lose. The exponential age, the end of American empire and global weirding means no one knows what is going on. The next real marker on our calendar is the midterms. So bear down for midterms. I’ll be wash trading to get some actual cost basis losses till then.

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Finance Internet Culture

Day 371 and Never Work A Day In Your Life

I had almost nothing on my calendar today I didn’t want to do. I had small administrative things that took up maybe two hours and that’s excessive by my standards. It’s rare I ever have more than half an hour of genuine obligations. Mostly I just go where I feel like on any given day. I lay in bed on my phone and I move the world with strangers on the internet.

I’m not sure how I optimized for this kind of idyllic work life. I certainly didn’t used to live this way. When I was a founder I was constantly at the mercy of meetings I didn’t want and obligations I wanted to shirk. I always felt put upon. I never felt more like hustle culture owned my life than during my founding years. I was constantly optimizing and I felt like I never had any relief.

Maybe it’s the pandemic. Once we stopped with offices and workdays and all their attendant events and activities, life got a lot better. Everyone kind of settled into routines that made space for what mattered most to them. We no longer had cocktail parties or conferences. Thought leadership stopped being keynote speeches and started being shitposts on Twitter.

I don’t know what the fuck I did it exactly to free myself from that over scheduled fate. I’m so much happier and more efficient. I get shit done and I am less stressed and working fewer unnecessary hours.

Maybe part of it is that I might be a better investor than I was a founder. I could spend the whole day skipping through direct messages and sharing insights in Telegram group chats or having product breaksdowns in Notion. I’m actually good at what I do now. I bring more value and I do it more quickly. Maybe this is what real optimized work is like. You are so good it’s easy.

I’m so fucking happy right now. Over the last hour I’ve done more to advance my deals, connect my community and dig into shit that I genuinely passionately love than I thought I could do in an week. It’s like winning the lottery. I cannot believe I make money doing this.

I basically gossip all day with super smart people and then trade a bunch of densely coded social signals. Those all translate into money. I plot elaborate stories with fellow degenerates with deep aesthetics and then we send it into media zeitgeist. It’s like I work in fashion but the pay is much much better. So I guess it is true what they say. Do what you love and you never work a day I’m your life.

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Finance Internet Culture

Day 359 and SOS

A few days ago I wondered what project or cultural artifact was going to grab our mutual cultural attention during the Christmas vacation week? Something always does. One year it was fucking Quora if you can believe it. This year I’m ready to call it for $SOS at least if you are into Web3 and crypto economics.

On fucking Christmas Day these degenerates drop a contract to let anyone claim tokens who has ever purchased an NFT on the OpenSea marketplace. And people went ape shit. Suddenly someone had taken all the visible contributions from OpenSea and manifested them in a token and said this is ours. Fuck corporate dominance of profit your users hold the real value. I’ve never seen anything so ballsy. Last year when Wall Street Bets decided to taken on hedge funds I felt like we had entered a new era of community behavior.

An emergent community has swum up from the sea and eaten the lunch of a supposedly greedy centralized platform. Web3 just attacked what we didn’t even realize was Web2. A crypto darling turned parable for centralization in the space of a few years. $SOS seemed to say community owned this value all along. The airdrop showed us the balance of power in a web3 community if we all work together. I’m so impressed by the sheer cultural force of the statement. It could all go horribly awry but god damn if it isn’t utopian.

I’ve got not fucking clue if this is a legitimate contract or not. I’m not going to FUD. But from a first principles, we are building a new internet where the incentives of the users align with the technology statement, then this is quite a shot across the bow. Also I’m pretty sure this makes it harder for OpenSea to IPO if their user base is in open rebellion against who gets rewarded.

The thing is I believe Devin to be a well meaning and genuinely forward thinking guy. He’s a terrific communicator that set out with the utopian intentions that we all do. But we are moving so fast with breaking cultural norms and acceptable societal level rewards for contributions to an economy that I think we might have just spiraled up to some kind of cultural singularity. Crypto might just be moving that fast. Whatever happens this is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen from a startup. Score one for the anonymous degens.

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Finance Internet Culture Startups

Day 353 and Wagmi

Gaming is what finally pilled me on crypto. When I took a medical leave a few years ago I felt isolated. I picked up a number of social games as a way to feel connected to other people. What started as fucking off ultimately transformed my perspective on investing. I didn’t know it yet but it was setting the stage for my fascination with web3.

I made friends. Real friendships despite none of us ever spending time together IRL. I made friends all over the world in completely different places, from wildly different social and economic classes, and we all easily collaborated to win together.

And while this sounds obvious I learned just how much talent and intelligence is evenly distributed to my fellow humans. The only difference between me and many of my fellow gamers was that I was born with a good passport. While everyone had the same access to internet as me, what they didn’t have was the same access to to global markets as I did. We could play together but we couldn’t invest together.

Their ambitions were cut short because of geopolitical decisions that had nothing to do with their ability to contribute and accumulate meaningful value. I had always known this intellectually, but never before had I been so deeply emotionally connected to so much human diversity as I was through gaming online.

Frankly it radicalized the fuck out of me. People in the West have no idea how good they’ve got it. And it’s a crime that we are not all actively working for all of our species to have equal access to markets. It’s just fucking time to drop the colonialism and the exceptionalism and combine our ambitions. We’ve got big problems to solve.

For me wagmi is some powerful solidarity shit. And I’m basically a foot soldier to the plutocracy. I am at the top of the food chain. I’ve get every reason to want to rent seek and act a protectionist to preserve my place. But thanks to something so simple as playing with others got me back to the golden rule. Do unto others.

Web3 offers a radical cultural position that everyone should own their work and everyone should compete with the same rules. When we say “we are all gonna make it” it’s an optimism about the kind of future we can build together. Sure the wealth is good. We need those incentives to come together. Markets operate on self interest. So let’s use that slay the beasts of collaboration and make stuff together. Wagmi.

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Biohacking Finance Internet Culture Medical Startups

Day 350 and Web3 Healthcare

Imagine you’ve got a disease with a clear biomarker. I’ve got an autoimmune condition called ankylosing spondylitis. One of the ways to spot it on a blood test is to look for an elevated CRP or sed rate.

Maybe I want to find a way to connect with other patients. I provide proof of biomarker to join an autoimmune discord just like you provide proof of ownership of an NFT like they do in the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Maybe I want to join a group of other patients who are pooling their medical data so they can stop being in an N of 1 and have a chance to participate in new research for my own disease. I could join AutoimmuneDAO and contribute to funding, meme-ing, and researching my condition. If we discover a treatment protocol or drug through our DAO we’d have ownership in it. Imagine a token for your own patient DAO. This isn’t as crazy as it sounds. VitaDAO is doing this for longevity research. This is the future that web3 can bring to healthcare.

Quantified self and biohacking have improved my health significantly. But on its own my personal health data has little value. You would maybe pay me a few cents for my biometrics. The real value of that data is in the aggregate. That’s why I pay Whoop to manage my HRV data and why they won’t offer data interoperability.

The value is in the algorithm. But without me and without my data it wouldn’t be worth anything. They have a product and an algorithm because of my biometrics. And yet we’ve found no way to meaningfully integrate ownership and interoperability in healthcare yet.

Let me give an an example. There are multiple companies that make their money by recruiting clinical trial candidates. Why? Because you need aggregate data to run a study. Those companies have the same basic data analytic team as a marketing team at a direct to consumer product company. They know how much a patient (or customer) is worth and the cost to acquire them. You are worth a lot because you represent a demographic that has value in its totality. And yet most clinical trials fail to recruit people because patients just don’t see a benefit to participating. You’ve got no ownership or upside and the costs are significant. So science suffers.

But what if instead of being valuable to marketing and recruiters you could own a portion of the aggregate? Being a token holding biomarker “proof of disease” validated member of a patient research DAO flips the incentives. A breakthrough on a disease that treats you and you’d also own some of the proceeds of it’s intellectual property. Whoever brings web3 to healthcare is going to be doing a significant good for humanity. Web3 can improve diseases, move forward science and get us all paid.

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Finance Startups

Day 348 and Empathic Investing

The best investor I know is Cyan Banister. When I was coming up in the web2 world I got to watch how Cyan handled early stage relationships. She brought total empathy to every interaction I witnessed. The kind of candor, kindness and willingness help her founders eventually set the template for how I wanted to work. I wanted to invest with my whole self like Cyan.

While I doubt it was the primary motivation or even expected outcome, Cyan’s angel investments are some of the best returning of the generation. If you subscribe to Alex Danco’s theory of social capital and angel investing this kind of investing is playing an infinite game. It clicked for me then that the real edge you can bring to the earliest stages of startups is an open heart. An open heart gives you an open mind. And everything else is a matter of tactics from there.

Creativity comes from seeing something in a completely new light. A change in metaphor can lead to tangible physical discoveries and complete cultural revolutions. Science fiction gave us the tricoder and the internet. Imagination literally helps forge the future. So it’s important if you want to spot the catalyzing “this changed everything” moments that you be open to seeing the world in an entirely new light.

While I obviously have an investment thesis on the macro level events shaping market demands, it’s not practically nearly as helpful in the day to day of investing as just being human. Creation is volatility. It’s not usual for a founder to bounce between terror and euphoria on the same day. Imagine how exhausting that can be when your entire life is always fight or flight and fear or famine.

My only job is to show up for a founder in that moment and accept them for who they are. They need to trust me enough to tell me if they are scared. Trust me enough to share their biggest wildest dreams. It’s a delicate and intimate thing to be there for someone no matter what. But I firmly believe that is what it takes to build something worthwhile. It’s never ever clear from the outset if it will succeed. The only thing we can truly have confidence in is our ability to solve the problems along the way. Chances we’ve seen the tactical playbook and can help you solve those more easily. Many of us come with baked-in operator skills like acquisition or operations. We can teach you that.

While this may all sound utopian, or if you are a bit cynical, even maudlin I assure you this is the most competitive way you can approach investing. If capital is simply a commodity you must infuse your work with real value to compete. If you have a lot of assets under management maybe you can add a lot of services. Large prestige funds with billions in AUM can offer that. But now you have to have bigger deals and surer outcomes so that impacts what you can invest in. Scale impacts outcome in all kinds of practical ways.

If it’s all about the capital then you can be beaten not just by a better term sheet (which just makes everything you do more expensive) but also by someone who brings intangibles to their place on the cap table. You know whose pro-rata doesn’t get cut? The person who showed up day in and day out before the round got competitive and every is kissing ass to get in. The founder remembers. And so does the empathetic capital. We win twice over because our deals are cheaper and we stay in them longer.

So founders and fellow investors ask yourself who you want in your corner from the start. You may find the smartest capital is actually the nicest capital as well.

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Finance Preparedness Startups

Day 320 and Chaotic Families

I’m fundraising for a seed stage venture capital rolling fund chaotic.capital. Since this is a blog for my friends if you are an accredited investor I’d love for you wander on over to take a looksy. Or feel free to send me a DM on Twitter or slide into my email inbox which is julie AT chaotic dot capital. The TL:DR on the fund is that the world is getting exponentially more complex and that is making living life chaotic as fuck.

Humans don’t like chaotic. We like predictable. So we invest in seed stage technology startups that help individuals, families, organizations, and even whole communities, adapt to living with in a more chaotic world. I’m talking about all the areas we invest in on the blog. Yesterday I mused about chaotic labor markets and what kinds of companies are exciting to us there.

Today’s post is about about how families might adapt to a more chaotic world and who might capitalize on the future of adaptable families. Millenials aren’t having children. Maybe because they know our current systems aren’t set up to support working parents and their children they decided it wasn’t feasible. We need to fix this if we want to have a future.

Millennials lack the familial and community ties of previous generations and they dislike that they have been saddled with increased housing & education costs while having fewer resources to invest in having families and homes. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a resurgence of planned communities and kibbutz style housing. HomesteadDAO or KibbutzDAO could emerge as collaborative non-corporate structures for new planned communities. Or get wild and maybe we see baby DAOs with multiple parents legally bound to one child. For all you Expanse fans I would be open to raising a Jim Holden on a Montana homestead with you. Only kinda joking.

Practically though the only way we solve for a better future for families is by giving individuals the flexibility they need across all facets of their life so we can adapt families to the future.

We need to support families where they live, where they educate themselves & their children, where they source & prepare food, where they need medicine & healthcare, and even where they find partners. There is a lot more private industry and startups can to support families profitably. The more flexibility we can grant people in building their ideal family unit the better. If one variable changes then every variable changes. That’s where startups excel generally. Software can expand the set of services available to people.

Because we’ve got a social structure problem with capitalism right now. Families aren’t affordable. Maybe we see alternative housing and family structures become increasingly appealing as the nuclear family structure cannot not afford a family. We may see living arrangements that let multiple families come together to provide childcare, food, education communal support. Whatever solutions come up we need to consider them.

Or we find ways to let families come back together. Increasing rural broadband and support for remote work could allow kids to move back to their hometowns to be near parents and grandparent to give us a chance to knit back together communities and combat urban isolation. The more we can improve opportunities in rural towns where existing family lives the more opportunities we create. That means we will need to provide all the services we expect in a city but remotely. Software businesses to the rescue! Here is an incomplete and in no particular order list of startups I would consider funding.

Request for Startups.

  • School contract swaps for private schools to allow easy mid year transitions or voucher searches for public schools
  • Teacher & childcare marketplaces, swaps or even parent run DAOs (bounty for 7th grade science teacher for homesteadDAO anyone?)
  • Home care shares & swaps or marketplaces (elder & children)
  • Remote healthcare providers & their tech stack particular support for specialties, pharmacy & data products
  • Fractional housing, co housing & house shares or other communal living for families
  • HomesteadDAO, KibbutzDAO, TownDAOs, Mobile & Van Life DAOs
  • Rural broadband services
  • Direct to consumer farm access to enable food supply outside of supermarkets & hubs
  • Any & all remote work & collaboration SaaS products & training to move more jobs out of urban hubs.
  • Fertility or birthing DAOs and co-parenting legal constructs for multiple parents
Categories
Finance Internet Culture Startups

Day 315 and Probably Nothing

The aesthetics of most crypto backlashes feel easy to dismiss if you have bought into the optimism that web3 might release the stranglehold of the Big Tech monopolies. Bomers & losers griping are just copium right?

Bitching about scams and grifters is fair. But every leap the tech industry has ever had has come with it’s share of idiotic opportunists. They usually get wiped out out. Well except the accidental millionaires. You kind of have to learn to live with that. Plenty of underserving fucknuts will be richer than you. NFT parties in New York isn’t inherently stupider than Comdex. Life is unfair. And yes it sucks. Go to therapy.

The reflexive criticism of crypto tends to break into more nuance when it goes from “but scammers” to “but utility!” But no one thought Twitter would be useful either and most of my social and actual capital has been derived from social media. The downside of web2 is that only a small portion of people benefited. And it’s true that the rewards weren’t terribly even. The accumulation of power and capital has been disastrous. But that should be more of an incentive to push for a decentralized future not less.

I had a lot more thoughts on this topic earlier in the day and I had planned on diving deeper with citations but I’m tired so I think I’ll leave it at that. If you are angry and defensive about something new it’s worth asking yourself why it scares or upsets you. Maybe the defense mechanism is hiding something important from you.

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Finance Media Startups

Day 299 and Hiring An Assistant

I’ve been thinking it is time to hire an assistant. Obviously I need help and the job would be working with me. But I want to train up someone who would like to acquire my unique set of skills. I’d like to mentor someone up on the startup ecosystem that I’ve spent the last fifteen years working through as a founder, operator and now venture investor so they too can take advantage of the incredible network of people that are building today.

I’m looking for someone that would like to get exposure to all the areas where I have expertise. You don’t have to know or even like all areas, obviously this would depend on the candidate, but what makes me an unusual player in startup and venture land is the weird mashup of specialties. So if you want to learn:

1. Angel & seed stage investing analyst skills
2. Media & hype (call it public relations if you must)
3. How one keeps your head on straight in a discourse laden zeitgeist chaos landscape

Then you might enjoy working with me. The goal of this assistant or analyst position would be within 2 years you’d go on to do what I do somewhere else & I’ll sensei you through that journey. I am where I am because of mentors and bosses that taught me the ropes.

As I work closely with my partner and husband Alex Miller you would get exposure to the operational and logistical side of investing as well as startup operations. He’s actually my inspiration for this job. His first job out of college was for Jason Calacanis. Without him none of the other jobs and connections would have been possible. And we owe him big time as without Jason we wouldn’t have Stack Overflow in our life.

I’ve only every met one person who has my particular weird blend of growth, media and investing. I do some traditional public relations and would love to pass that on to someone that could leverage it well for their own startups. But it is entirely in service to my investing and portfolio with the occasional other favor, so it’s much more portfolio services for our investments than a PR shop. But you’d learn our portfolio from the inside out as investment decisions and then figure out how to take these seed stage companies to market with the media. Which is a pretty unique thing so not a traditional gig.

Non traditional backgrounds are awesome. No degree requirements. No credentialism or social signaling. Disabled folks welcome. I’m also disabled so we do accommodations. There is no set schedule as I don’t work one so whenever you work best is great. Any location or geography is fine. Any time zone though I work on mountain. Degen anons with anime avis welcome (encouraged as I’d like someone fluent in crypto). If you are an anon avi who wants to get into crypto investing and figure out how to work the zeitgeist for your meme magic I am here to be your mentor. And then I’m an ideal world I’d be the first check into your startup as this is about the ecosystem. So if this sounds fun slide into my DMs on Twitter and tell me what the one thing you do better than anyone else.

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Finance Startups

Day 275 and Manifesting

I had a really terrific September. Everything just started going my way. Projects that I’d been pushing on had significant breakthroughs. My deals got hot. My focus and health improved. Even when I had setbacks and failures I was able to execute on quick recoveries. But mostly I didn’t give in to past bad habits. And all of that happened without any additional effort on my part.

I’ve been making a really conscious effort to stop pushing myself to always be doing more. Either I am able to find elegant solutions or I ask myself to take a step back till I can. Rather than brute forcing everything I am finding ways get where I am going without sacrificing myself to costly bad trades on my time and energy.

I asked for something really significant from one of my investments (an additional allocation for an special purpose vehicle). The second I asked for it I started to panic. I didn’t have an immediate or simple path to deliver on what I asked for from this founder. Even though I was confident I had the money for the deal it out I panicked that maybe I had bitten off more than I could chew. Immediately it started going through my head about how bad I’d feel if failed this founder. I relived the guilt, shame and punishment I had felt in previous failures to deliver for people that trusted me. I hated feeling like I’d failed people.

And I just decided stopped the cycle of worry then. Like turning off a switch. I told myself I could do it, I knew I could do it or I wouldn’t have asked, and that there was simply no way I was going to let down this founder. But this is where I felt the frown Instead of going into overdrive, I stuck by my schedule. I didn’t change anything. I didn’t push myself to a frenzy by adding in calls, pitches & emails. I just put down all the steps I could and would take to make the deal available to the right people and I began.

In the past I would have let that fear drive me. I would have gone into overwork and adding in additional tactics that I didn’t even need to insure I would reach my goal. But here I trusted myself to get the outcome. I didn’t exhaust myself. I took care of myself. And the allocation got filled quickly. I checked the commitments this morning and I’ve only got 15% of the deal left.